Richard A. Silver

Only 1% of U.S. doctors are responsible for the largest share of paid medical malpractice claims – some 32%, according to a Stanford University study that was recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine(“Prevalence and Characteristics of Physicians Prone to Malpractice Claims,” January 28, 2016).

Medical and law researchers at Stanford examined 10 years of medical data from the U.S. National Practitioner Data Bank. The study covered 66,426 paid malpractice claims against 54,099 physicians between January 2005 and December 2014.

With this new data, we now have the ability to identify at an early stage physicians that are prone to claims, implement efforts to improve care and stop future claims from being filed – and patients from being harmed. Obviously, physicians that have medical malpractice claims with great frequency should be fully scrutinized.